Bringing it All Back Home: Why Bob Dylan Sold His Catalog for $300 Million
In early December, Bob Dylan sold his catalog of more than 600 original songs to Universal Music, for upwards of $300 million. The New York Times reported that Dylan himself was heavily involved in the sale. This came four years after he sold his personal archive — a collection of more than 6,000 items including notes, draft lyrics, poems, artwork, and photographs — to Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Kaiser Foundation, for an estimated $15-$20 million.
Dylanologist Greil Marcus + me at the 2019 International Bob Dylan Symposium. He was super excited to take this photo.
Anyone who has spoken to me for more than a few minutes knows that I have a passion for Bob Dylan’s music which transcends fandom, and approaches scholarship (if you’re being nice) or fanaticism (if you’re being honest). Accordingly, the day the sale was announced, I received about a dozen notes from a variety of sources — one uncle, a couple of boyhood friends, a former roommate, an MFA classmate — variously congratulating me on the sale (as I’d been congratulated when he won the Nobel Prize in 2016), accusing Dylan of “selling out,” and asking me if I knew why it happened.
I’ll say this upfront: Despite my decade-plus-long devotion to Dylan’s music, I unfortunately don’t possess a channel directly into the man’s mind. I can’t say with absolute certainty why Dylan decided now was the time to sell, but I have one hypothesis which I haven’t read elsewhere: He’s looking out for his kids.
Bob Dylan has six children — including Jakob Dylan, of Wallflowers fame, and Jesse Dylan, of “Kicking and Screaming” directorship. He also has eleven grandchildren — including once-rapper, now-folkie Pablo Dylan. His net worth is estimated at $350 million. In May of 2021, he’ll turn 80 years old. While, since 1988, he’s toured every year, more often than not playing around 100 shows between March and November, 80 is an age at which pressure builds to put one’s affairs in order.
According to the Times, “Dylan’s [publishing] deal includes 100 percent of his rights for all the songs of his catalog, including both the income he receives as a songwriter and his control of each song’s copyright.” That means he’ll get the vast majority of the $300 million price tag. It also means that, when he passes (which I’m still convinced is only 98% guaranteed), he will get to decide who gets it.
What Dylan did — valued his assets, turned hard-to-manage illiquid assets into easy-to-manage liquid assets, assumed total control of his wealth’s future — is prudent financial management. Many people, artists especially, in comparable situations aren’t so forward-thinking. When people leave the management of vast estates to fate, things can get ugly.
In a heartbreaking example of things getting ugly, let’s look at a nearly identical situation: Prince. Prince — like Dylan, a Minnesota native, and an iconic songwriter/performer — died suddenly of a fentanyl overdose in 2016. That’s tragic enough, but to add injury to injury, Prince died without a will. That presented a slew of problems.
Not only did Prince’s heirs lose millions in ensuing legal fees, but USA Today recently reported that the executors dramatically undervalued Prince’s estate, prompting the IRS to step in. The term “IRS” should send a chill through your very essence. Why? It means yet another lengthy, expensive valuation process, grinding at the glacial pace of the U.S. Federal Government.
The kicker: “The discrepancy [in the valuation of Prince’s estate which prompted the IRS to step in] primarily involves Prince's music publishing and recording interests, according to court documents” (my italics).
In other words, Prince’s expensive estate executors undervalued Prince’s music by a staggering $80 million.
Dylan’s music catalog and personal archive sales have allowed him to neatly avoid all of the conflict that Prince’s tragic passing catalyzed. Instead of leaving the nebulous task of valuing music to attorneys and tax investigators, he’s putting a cold, hard figure on it now, so that he can decide exactly how it gets used in the future. Yes, he could have stipulated in his will that his relatives inherit the rights to his songs — but how could he possibly do that equitably? How would he determine which child would get the rights to “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or which grandchild would get “Tangled Up in Blue”? What if Pablo is a folk purist — would he want the electrified “Like a Rolling Stone”? Would anyone want the disco Dylan stuff (see: “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?”))?
The sales accomplished several gargantuan tasks:
Put Dylan himself in a more comfortable position to enjoy his twilight years
Avoided messy, costly valuation process(es)
Put his family in a fiscally stabler and more emotionally harmonious situation in the (possible) event of his passing
I’ll also, for the sake of my pride, touch on the notion that he “sold out” by selling his catalog. I don’t know exactly what the term “sold out” refers to in this case — he owned the rights to his songs to begin with, so he was already receiving healthy royalty payouts, and would have continued to do so until he died, at which point his family (presumably) would have received the payouts. He has made a comfortable living as a singer-songwriter for a half-century and has achieved legendary status because of writing era-defining songs. Many of these songs had a certain iconoclastic edge to them — “Advertising signs that con/You into thinking you’re the one…” (“It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”) — which leads people to scoff when he plays ball with the material world. But, as a scholar/fanatic, I can confidently say I don’t think you’ll find anything in his $300 million catalog about not collecting your just desserts.
Vague critiques like these aside, my overarching theory is that he’s looking out for his family. It’s entirely possible that the $300 million he got in the deal is less than the payouts his songs will receive in the next, oh, 100 years, or however long it takes for climate change to destroy humanity. But, in liquid form, it will be distributed more easily, equitably, and manageably as time goes on. It deflects decades of litigation that can destroy families, and it keeps the power of Dylan’s music in the hands of music-savvy professionals.
about the author
Photograph by Georgia Hampton.
Dustin Lowman is a freelance writer based in Connecticut. Dustin began writing in first grade, focusing mainly on short stories about dragons who became NFL quarterbacks and sympathetic tales about Frankenstein’s monster. Upon graduating college, Dustin moved to Nashville, TN to pursue his dream of becoming a career singer/songwriter. After encountering predictable yet no less stultifying obstacles, Dustin shifted gears, enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Writing MFA program, and developing his journalism, marketing copywriting, and podcasting chops in the process. Dustin now owns and operates his own freelance writing business, Guitar & Pen. He can be reached via email for inquiries related to his writing services (or Bob Dylan).